Terminator: Salvation Gets Another Poster

One of the complaints I had about the last batch of Terminator posters was that they didn’t use the series iconography well enough. In that point this poster is a big leap forward. The T skull as it exists in this poster is easyly recognizable in a way nothing on the other posters was. It feels like home.

But what is most interesting about this is how it turns that iconography on it’s head (literally!). Seeing that disembodied skull being carried by some lowly human does take some of the bite of the terminator. At the same time it is an impressive and shocking image that puts us in the middle of the war between humans and machines. It sets up this as a different film then the others, one where the terminators are not some invincible monsters we must always flee from, but something that can actually be fought. Sometimes, different is good. Considering the last films, I think people will be excited about some fighting back.

The poster also manages to make a halfway decent job of setting placing the movie’s happening on an apocalyptic future.

I still don’t care for the color scheme, but all things considered this is a big improvement.

And just to echo something that James Ford said on comments, I would like someone to explain to me why Sam Worthington is getting so much space in these posters. In this one his name takes up about as much space as Bale’s. In the last one his character got one third of the poster. Really, considering how unknown Sam is this seems inexplicable.

Did the Terminator (T-800) walk in front of Bale’s sight line while he was shooting a scene? Outside of the motion poster, I hate this print campaign. But it doesn’t matter — this movie’s going to rock the box office regardless of what they print.